When buying land it is terribly important to learn from others who have "been there." It's interesting that when I was learning my way that I tried to find information that would give me practical techniques for buying land for sale and vacant land, but none existed. Quite a bit of the things that caused me problems were as a result of my inexperience and getting involved in things that I knew nothing about.
Or of not asking for direction in my decisions. Believe me, now I ask God for help with my decisions and things work much better.
The reason that I am inclined to write about experience with land is because of what happened some time ago which brings home the importance of experience, which is why I offer personal email assistance with my materials.
I know this is hard to believe but recently I showed a lady how she could have made over $ 200,000 in less than 6 months on one tract of land, had she known alternative techniques.
Marti is a very experienced real estate lady but she has no experience with land. One day she called me and asked if I would meet her at a tract of land that she had located near her country home and give her my opinion. I said, 'sure' and we discussed the land and then met at the acreage.
The tract is 57 areas and has frontage on two roads. One of the roads is a paved county road and the other is an easement on a dirt road.
Marty was talking about dividing the tract and improving the dirt road and expanding it. Then she wanted to put some mobile homes for rent on the dirt road. Then selling the part of the tract that had frontage on the paved road.
But she was not sure if it was a good piece of land and whether her plan was a good one or not. She was basically wanting an opinion on how she should manage the tract for the best financial result for herself.
I did not feel comfortable from the start with her thoughts on improving a dirt road and bringing in mobile homes. She had told me that the dirt road was "ok" but when we got there I could not believe my eyes. I have seen dirt roads before and have built several, but that was one of the worse I had ever seen.
First of all, there was only a 20 'easement and I do not like working with easements and especially only 20' wide. I certainly feel that 20 'is too narrow. (I prefer 40 'to 60' easements.) Plus the small dirt road was in very bad need of grading and the worse part was a terrible culvert situation at a small stream crossing.
The culvert was too short and made a very narrow crossing and the soil material around it was red clay. Of course red clay becomes very slippery when it gets wet, so there needs to be sandy type material or gravel, in order to have an all weather road.
So the first thing I did was to throw cold water on her idea of improving a dirt road and bringing in mobile homes and we will continue this discussion in the next article.